Chris Smaje:

Thailand has been a relative economic success story in recent years, increasing its GDP per capita well above the global average. Historically, it’s had a large offshore fishing fleet, but with the country’s economic success it’s become hard to recruit Thais into the industry. Fishing is hard and dangerous work — who’d do it when there are better options in a growing economy?

Often, the answer is people from poorer nearby countries like Myanmar and Cambodia. Often, too, these workers toil in conditions of near or actual slavery. Slavery has been defined as a state of social death, and social death is easy to arrange on a boat in the ocean run by people from a different country and community.

When accounting the benefits of economic growth to Thais, it’s necessary also to account the price that’s paid by others from surrounding countries. The story of money as a power of oligarchic community and money as usurious increase is a book of violence and social death written on a global canvas, with people enslaved on Thai fishing boats one footnote among many.

Michael Budde:

Among the most contested terms in the Western lexicon, “development” cannot be understood adequately unless one accepts that it is a violent, coercive process. … It involves the coerced reorganization of societies, peoples, lands, and practices. Sometimes that coercion is obvious, in the form of soldiers or police or private violence that pushes people off their land, prohibits them access to needed sources of food and materials, or kills people who disagree with the ends and means of actors who drive the development process. In other times and places, the coercion takes less easily perceived forms, from changes in tax structures designed to push people from self-provisioning activities, to those dependent on wage markets, to legal processes that replace traditional land tenure systems with those that benefit the favored agents and outcomes of development processes. Moreover, this violence is not an originating practice that, once its grim work is accomplished, can be replaced by a more civilized sort of cooperative or voluntary set of interactions … but is a necessary and ongoing function throughout.

Development has and continues to be an unrelenting war on the ability of peoples to provide for their most basic needs—food, water, shelter, and more. It has been called the war on subsistence, and this five-hundred-year battle continues to push people further into depending for their survival on labor markets they do not control, investment policies they do not control, and ideological systems they do not control—all of which presuppose the intrinsic inferiority of subsistence activities relative to modern market relations in terms of efficiency, productivity, and freedom. However much they disagreed on other things, the need to destroy subsistence systems made allies of liberal capitalists and authoritarian state socialists, investment bankers, and most well-intentioned nonprofit organizations throughout most of the modern era. As Adam Smith knew but refused to say—it was left to his contemporary, Sir James Steuart, to say it explicitly—people first had to be made desperate by the destruction of subsistence activities before they would “voluntarily” agree to sell their labor power to the wealthy on whatever terms they could manage.

I want to get right with my brother

And be a refuge to the rest.

I want to sit down with a stranger

And learn about his life.

Cuz we’re all broken sometimes

And we’re all going to die.

We’re all broken sometimes

And we’re all going to die.

…

We’re all broken sometimes.

…

And we’re all going to die.

Carmen Imes:

The world feels so heavy and ugly.

The Epstein files

Minneapolis

Iran

Surgeries, hospitalizations, and mental health struggles of dear friends

Deaths. Too many deaths.

But today I held a newborn. She fit between my elbow and my hand, absolutely precious. Beautiful and perfect in every way.

Hope incarnate.

Interview with Carmen Imes:

One of the texts that reminds me of that you pointed out, and I hadn’t noticed before, at least I hadn’t noticed the Hebrew dynamics in, is Exodus 22, where you… It’s funny because for those Hebrew nerds out there, I was in my Hebrew class just teaching on the infinitive absolute, which is used to create emphatic clauses in Hebrew.

So you put an infinitive absolute next to an imperfect, and it creates this emphatic clause.

Like bold, underlined…

Yeah, exactly. Like in Genesis 3, if you eat from the tree, it’s: “in the middle of the garden, dying, you will die.” So it uses the same verb twice.

And in that verse [Exodus 22], as you note, the focus is on the widow and the orphan and God’s extreme response if the people oppress the widow or the orphan. And it uses the emphatic three times.

Yeah, so we’ve got three infinitive absolutes in a row, which I don’t know if there are any other verses in the Bible that have three in a row. You’d know that.

I don’t know of any.

So yeah, Exodus 22:21 begins with reminding them of their story. Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. You should know better. You have lived this story. You know what it’s like to be an outsider, to not know the language, to not have the resources, to be the object of everyone’s suspicion.

So don’t take advantage of people who are foreigners among you. And then verse 22: Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. So this is members of a household where the patriarch, the father figure has died and they lack representation. Maybe at the city gate, they don’t have somebody to fight for them or protect them.

And it says in verse 23, if you do — and this is the first infinitive absolute — if you do do this, like you actually oppress someone and they cry, cry out to me — crying they cry out to me — then I will certainly hear their cry — so: hearing, I will hear their cry.

And again, I don’t know of another verse that has three in a row of these. This is God yelling. […]

This is a message we need. People talk about the angry God of the Old Testament. And I want to say, let’s pay attention to what makes God really angry. When you are brutal toward someone who is vulnerable — whether that person is a foreigner, whether they have been widowed or they have been orphaned — you are putting yourself in the crosshairs of God’s most strident judgment.

Dr. Dixie Dillon Lane (Hearth & Field print, no link that I could find):

We must learn to live with unsettledness, with things stuck for a while in the uncomfortably incomplete middle. This is hard for the productivity-minded person; turning, during such passages, toward other forms of fruitfulness helps. But don’t take it too far: we must also learn to slow ourselves and be at peace in seasons of fallowness and rest.

[…]

When we plant marigolds or impatiens or other annuals, we expect a brief flush of color, but we know it is just for a season. An investment of time elaborately adorning our lives with carnations, columbines, tulips, torch lilies, hydrangeas, and hellebores, on the other hand, carries the hope that their beauty and fragrance will always be with us. But nothing born of this Earth is truly perennial…. At the same time, though, so long as we are here and so long as the seasons keep spinning around us, it is ours to rise and try again.

——

Russia fired a wave of air strikes across eastern Ukraine last night, killing four—including three toddlers—in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Bohodukhiv. A Russian drone struck their house as part of a broader strike on the area that also injured two people, including a pregnant woman. The night before, in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk, a Russian aerial assault killed two other people, an 11-year-old girl and her mother, and injured at least 16 others, including a 7-year-old child.

——

Omar El Akkad:

An eighteen-month-old with a bullet wound to the forehead. Maybe the sniper was aiming elsewhere. Maybe there’s some explanation. Maybe it was necessary.

——

Madeleine L’Engle (an entire poem not easily quotable):

And a second time he spoke
when the Lord kept the children beside him
and suffered them not to be taken away:
“These are the ones that are left us,
but where, Lord, is the Kingdom of Heaven?
Where, Lord, are the others?
What of them? What of them?”
And he wept.

——

Headlines and stories regularly beg the question: are we Les Murray’s “fellow crying in Martin Place” or somewhere in the crowd? Do we fear the all-acceptance, or will we receive the gift?

… the hollow he makes about him
in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,
and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him
stare out at him, and feel, with amazement, their minds
longing for tears as children for a rainbow.

[…]

… the slickest wit amongst us

trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected
judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream
who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children
and such as look out of Paradise come near him
and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.

Ridiculous, says a man near me, and stops
his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit — 
and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand
and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;
as many as follow her also receive it

and many weep for sheer acceptance, and more
refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,
but the weeping man, like the earth, requires nothing,
the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out
of his writhen face and ordinary body

not words, but grief, not messages, but sorrow,
hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea —
and when he stops, he simply walks between us
mopping his face with the dignity of one
man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.

Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.

——

(Still, still, still, still not for me.)

Interview with Carmen Imes:

So I’m curious across this trilogy that you’ve written, how your views have changed or modified in the process of writing these books. Are there things on which you’ve found yourself shifting such that now, at the end of this journey you’ve been on with these three books, you find yourself in a different place just maybe theologically or the way you see the Bible?

I do think one shift has been a growing awareness of how the same message can land differently in different communities. So, bearing God’s name — in that book, I’m arguing that every believer has been stamped with God’s name or claimed by God as belonging to God’s family. And so, therefore, we should live in alignment with that, we should represent Him well.

And I noticed when I was speaking at a Chinese seminary last year that there was some pushback to that. There was a sense of: this is too much like the pressure that our parents put on us to perform in order to keep up the honor for our family. And I realized that it could be received more as pressure than invitation. Whereas in a very white Western context, the problem is we think: my faith is just between me and God and it’s nobody else’s business. And so I was wanting to say, no, look, we belong to each other and what you do, the way you live matters for faith. But I think in an Asian context, actually, the emphasis might need to be in a different direction. There might need to be different framing of that.

So one friend suggested that maybe I should have used the illustration from Toy Story where Andy is the boy, and he’s got all these toys, and you’re watching the toys go through this adventure. And there’s a part in the movie where Woody, the favorite toy, gets separated from Andy, and yet he proves that he still belongs to Andy. And he goes through this crisis where he rediscovers his belonging to Andy by looking at the bottom of his shoe where it says “Andy.” So maybe that’s a less pressureful way of thinking about bearing God’s name.

So that’s one place I’ve shifted. I still believe in the message of bearing God’s name, but I’m realizing that for different contexts, it might need a different framing.

Frederick Buechner:

3. If you have even as much as a nodding acquaintance with a foreign language, try reading the Bible in that. Then you stand a chance of hearing what the Bible is actually saying instead of what you assume it must be saying because it is the Bible. Some of it you may hear in such a new way that it is as if you had never heard it before. “Blessed are the meek” is the way the English version goes, whereas in French it comes out, “Heureux sont les debonnaires” (“Happy are the debonair”). The debonair of all things! Doors fly open. Bells ring out.